30 September 2013 4:17 PM

It is very sad, but some people may actually be influenced by the argument that a UKIP vote at the 2015 election will put ‘Red Ed’ into Downing Street. Of course it will. That’s the whole point of doing it, a negative action misrepresented by expressing it as a positive one. You can’t keep Tweedledumber out without putting Tweedledumb in. There is no facility for electing no government at all (though given their performances lately, whyever not?). You do it because you really don’t much care who wins, and why should you? You want to punish someone.

I , for instance, am not one of those who say there’s absolutely no difference between the parties. I actually think that Labour wouldn’t have dared to smash up the armed forces the way the Tories have done. It’s a sort of Nixon and China point, not a moral plus for Labour. But it’s a fact. And I am astonished that the intervention of two ex-soldiers at the Tory conference on Sunday did not get more coverage than it did.

Did those present not see that they were witnessing a gigantic earthquake of Krakatoan proportions? A Tory Defence Secretary heckled by moustachioed and medal-hung ex-soldiers, for cutting the armed forces? And this in the days of supposedly total security, when all dissenting opinion is sniffed out and excluded, and none but the vetted get within a furlong of the conference hall? Lucky for the Tories that these decent old coves went quietly. If you want to know why the Tories are bound to lose, then there’s your answer. If they can alienate such people, they’ve alienated their deep core. Yet the sketch-writers seemed more interested in a tawdry stall of Thatcher knick-knacks.

I was reminded of the curious events at a Tory rally in Blackpool in October 1958, recalled at length in my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ (first published as ‘The Broken Compass’). At this event, supporters of the League of Empire Loyalists were violently ejected from the hall for heckling Harold Macmillan. They were expressing or defending positions (on immigration and the winding up of the empire) similar to views that had quite recently been expressed by none other than Sir Winston Churchill, in the Cabinet Room of Ten Downing Street.

Which raises the amusing question of the Tory party’s incessant parading of Sir Winston as their exemplar and hero for the past 60 years or so, and conjures up the mental picture of the old boy being summarily ejected from a modern Tory Party conference by stone-faced stewards with plastic badges, to be handed over to ‘Security’ staff and then passed on to modern police officers with pepper sprays, Tasers and the usual paraphernalia of baseball caps, sub-machine guns, visible handcuffs and flexi-batons. Never in the field of human conflict, I’ll say.

Several distinguished journalists - no friends of the Empire Loyalists (no more am I) - were appalled at what happened to the Empire Loyalists on that long-ago Blackpool Day. They perhaps didn’t realise the real significance of it.

The Tories have always been ruthless in the pursuit of office, but the late Reginald Bosanquet, then a reporter for Independent Television News, testified later in court that the violence used against the Blackpool hecklers had been ‘excessive’. So did the late Bernard Levin, who said he had seen one of the hecklers marched into a room by uniformed stewards, whereupon ‘I heard cries and the door was repeatedly banged from the other side. When he came out he was very distressed’. Mr Levin also testified that the man was bleeding heavily from the nose, and his shirt was torn. This was, in a way, the Tories’ version of Labour’s far gentler ejection of Walter Wolfgang from their conference many years later. But it is largely forgotten because nobody much liked the Empire Loyalists, whereas old Walter was quite appealing.

This sort of thing really cannot happen now, thanks to TV, and I must admit, thanks to the Internet, which would spread images of it around the country so quickly that it would be politically impossible.

But I think it showed, even then, the truth – that the Tories had entirely accepted, by 1958, the Fabian reordering of Britain between 1945 and 1951, not to mention this country’s epochal defeat and humiliation by the USSR and the USA at Tehran, Yalta and Bretton Woods, and were prepared to enforce the change with all necessary ruthlessness.

Now they have entirely accepted the Blairite (ie EuroCommunist and Gramscian) reordering of the country between 1990 (the true beginning of Blairism) and 2010, and the German reordering of Europe since 1989 . And Michael Howard (the man laughably believed by some to be a ‘right-winger’, who created David Cameron and hugely centralised power in his party) and David Cameron himself were prepared to go to amazing lengths to reinforce this.

Their greatest enemies, in this project, are the loyal members and voters of their own party, who must be bullied, cajoled or otherwise persuaded into voting for and supporting governments which are hateful to them. The loathing is mutual, which is why I recently said on television that David Cameron did many of the things he does because he hates his own party. Of course he does. It's his job.

There’s only one answer to people who are wholly ruthless in the pursuit of office – and that’s to deny them office with equal ruthlessness. They will suffer far more from this than the voters will suffer from putting the ‘wrong’ party in office. Who (on either side of the political divide) thinks there has been any vast difference between the Coalition or the Blair-Brown, in their effects on daily life, living standards or human freedom? Or foreign policy? Or anything else?

Those who didn’t like the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock, and so abstained or voted for other parties in 1992, were not so thick that they didn’t grasp what their actions would bring about. Lo, John Major, perhaps the most unlikely victor in British electoral history, became Prime Minister. It wasn't that anyone much actually wanted him. It was that they didn't want the other one (much the same process put Ted Heath into Downing Street in 1970, after the famous 'unpopularity contest' between him and the by-then-discredited Harold Wilson).And the Labour Party was, for good or ill, forced to change, into something rather like John Major.

UKIP voters (and if you feel you must vote, which I don't, that’s the way to do it) can hardly believe that Nigel Farage is the national future. Even Mr Farage (and all credit to him for grasping it) knows that is not going to happen. But he also knows he can do a lot of mischief, and his latest plan, to offer individual Tories UKIP support, is very mischievous. It's absolutely not a pact(which would destroy UKIP) . But it could force a lot of blowhard 'Eurosceptic' Tories to show what they're really made of, or more likely what they aren't made of.

These UKIP supporters may genuinely hope to change the Tories, though the only way to change them is to destroy them utterly and replace them with almost anything else, perhaps a blob of plasticine. I mean, anything, anything would be better than this intellectually and morally bankrupt rump of deeply unattractive, ignorant and not-very-bright persons. Game of Thrones? More like a Game of Drones.

There’s a good chance that a Tory failure in 2015, especially if combined with Scotland voting to stay in the Union, will bring about the long-needed split and collapse of the Conservative Party. Scottish secession is in fact David Cameron’s only remaining hope of a Westminster majority. I am baffled and flummoxed by the number of commentators and politicians who claim, with straight faces, that the Tories can win an absolute majority in May 2015. On what polls are they basing this? It is virtually unknown for a governing party to increase its vote or share of the vote after five years in government – the March 1966 election, in which Labour got its absolute majority, followed a sort of probationary period of 18 months in which the voters decided (foolishly) that Harold Wilson was to be trusted after all. The 1983 Tory election triumph was brought about by the Falklands, and the 1987 one by the Alliance splitting the left utterly.

UKIP voters, many of whom feel as I do that the whole purpose of their vote should be to punish the Tories, need to go a step further. They should seek to destroy the Tories, so knocking down the great wall of flannel and conventional wisdom that keeps this country from discussing its own future, or influencing it. So what if ‘Red Ed’ gets in? Or a Lib-Lab coalition? Will you really be able to tell the difference? But five or ten years afterwards, we might have a proper British government again, which quite possibly may not happen, but will certainly never happen as long as the Tories survive.

21 April 2013 2:43 AM

It will not be long before your
home town has special places where drug abusers can poke or snort poison into
their bodies. These will be legal and paid for by you and me.

It is a stupid idea, of course.
People who take such drugs are selfish parasites in need of deterrence, not
patients in need of treatment.

The nicer we are to them, the
more of them there will be, as we have proved conclusively over the past four
decades.

But it is getting harder every
day to express this opinion, and soon it will be more or less impossible. The
British liberal establishment have decided to surrender to the powerful and
well-funded lobby that wants to ‘decriminalise’ drugs.

They use this clumsy word because
international treaties prevent us from actually legalising them. Instead, we
just reduce the penalties to nothing (or don’t enforce them) and make them
legal in all but name.

Before they can get away with
this loathsome scheme, they have to brainwash the public into accepting it.

That is why the unpopular
newspapers and the BBC have been giving favourable coverage to a plan for ‘drug
consumption rooms’ in Brighton. It is also why Portugal’s abandonment of
serious drug laws is constantly presented in a kindly light by the
establishment media.

Many of you will have been
brainwashed yourselves. Do you know how many supposedly ‘conservative’
newspapers endorsed the decriminalisation of cannabis years ago?

It is amazing how many otherwise
sensible people have already been fooled into accepting the dud arguments for
relaxing the law against cannabis, one of the most dangerous drugs in
existence.

Your children, too, will have
been brainwashed at school – where they will have absorbed the moronic argument
that because alcohol and tobacco are legal, it is wrong to have laws against
dope.

Whenever I have the chance to
debate this subject properly, I almost always defeat the drug liberalisers.

But that’s the problem. The
debate has been shut down, because the liberals control it. Only one side is
allowed to be heard. TV and radio won’t let me talk about this. My recent book,
showing that the supposed ‘war on drugs’ was abandoned 40 years ago, and that
claims of stern ‘prohibition’ are propaganda drivel, was simply not reviewed by
most national papers or on the broadcast programmes that discuss such things.

It is not yet too late to stop
this process, but a great deal of vigilance will be needed to do so. Otherwise
you may wake up one day soon and find a building near you is being openly used
by junkies to inject themselves, with police approval.

This is all the warning you will
get.

Will
lovely Imogen's name strike the wrong chord?

One of the many joys of the fine
new film A Late Quartet (disgracefully hard to find in cinemas) is the lovely
and talented actress Imogen Poots. My only worry is this: will her career be
held back by her charming but unusual surname? Marilyn Monroe, for instance,
started life as Norma Mortenson, Jean Harlow was Harlean Carpenter, and Greta
Garbo was Greta Lovisa Gustafsson.

I got into North Korea by dancing
(very badly) with the lovely female staff of the North Korean consulate in
Shenyang, China. This was the final stage of a hilarious obstacle course of
cash payments and weird encounters. My mobile telephone, which I had to hand in
before entering the Hermit Kingdom, has never recovered and is still haunted,
doing things it ought not to.

I don’t claim, like the BBC’s
John Sweeney, to have uncovered any great new truths while there. My main
discovery was that a lot of North Koreans (and is it any wonder?) are
hopelessly drunk most of the time. I think we should all take this sad
country’s threats a lot less seriously. The picture of female soldiers tripping
along in high heels rather sums up the strange mixture of comedy and misery
involved.

Some weeks ago, on the BBC
Question Time programme, Lord Heseltine claimed before a large audience that I
had called young soldiers ‘stupid’. I had not done so, as the record shows.

I protested at the time. He did
not withdraw. I wrote to him explaining in detail why I would never have said
such a thing. I asked him, twice, to set the record straight. He has twice
declined.

Well, I would point out that his
headed writing paper takes care to mention that he is the Right Honourable Lord
Heseltine, and that he is a Companion of Honour, an order whose motto is ‘In
action faithful and in honour clear’. Well, is this behaviour faithful,
honourable – or clear? Or are these chivalric titles just baubles of no
account? How sad, if so. I still hope he will do the decent thing. It seems to
me to be a matter of honour.

How strange to see people
applauding at Lady Thatcher’s funeral. What odd, un-British behaviour. But how
enjoyable to see the police compelled to wear proper tunics, and to see the
Church of England forced to use the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version of
the Bible, which it has spitefully stamped out in normal worship. But these
things were the last flickers of an older England, not a new beginning. Wait
and see what happens next time.

A nasty
outbreak of intolerance

The Left-wing media and their
internet allies continue to make much of the outbreak of measles in Swansea.

This seems to be turning into an
attack on free speech and on a free press. Particular rage is being directed
against conservative newspapers which gave prominence to claims – since
discredited – that the MMR vaccination was linked to autism.

The claims were originally
published in The Lancet, a highly respected and well-established
medical journal. It was perfectly reasonable for newspapers to take them
seriously.

The doubts were shared by Private
Eye, a far-from-conservative satirical magazine with a reputation for tough,
sceptical investigative reporting. Whistleblowers are sometimes wrong but
often right.

Governments are often wrong, and
secretive about their mistakes. Who can be sure who is correct on such
matters, at the time? What if the warnings had turned out to be justified?
Those who had sought to play them down would now look foolish.

Beware of this nasty mixture of
intolerance mixed with hindsight. And as for the measles outbreak, if the NHS
had continued to offer the choice of single jabs to worried parents,
rather than forcing them to choose between MMR or nothing, it is very likely
that this would have been avoided.

CAN’T TV programme-makers try a
bit harder to recreate the past? I lived in Oxford in the mid-Sixties, the
period in which ITV’s new detective drama Endeavour is supposed to be set.

I understand that the shabby,
tourist-free city of those days – with its steamy cattle-market, pungent
brewery and busy factories, cannot be recreated.

But nobody wrote the figure seven
in the continental style (with a horizontal line through the middle). Nobody
took ‘medication’ (it was called ‘medicine’), or said ‘there you go’. Women
didn’t wear pearls while pinning washing on the line. And the Vicar was the Rev
John Blenkinsop, or Mr Blenkinsop. He was never, ever Reverend Blenkinsop, a
stupid, ignorant Americanism nearly as bad as ‘bored of’, ‘can I get?’, and
‘train station’.

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14 April 2013 2:09 AM

I suspect that Margaret Thatcher would not have much minded the wave of spiteful, immature loathing unleashed among foolish, ill-mannered people by her death.

She knew perfectly well that nothing can be achieved in politics without making enemies, though it is important to make the right ones.

I am not myself a worshipper at the Thatcher Shrine, but anyone who can make foes of Michael Heseltine, the Soviet Communist Party, Arthur Scargill, Left-wing teachers by the thousand, The Guardian newspaper, the Church of England, Jacques Delors, the BBC, Salman Rushdie and Glenda Jackson simply cannot be all bad.

The only thing that would have annoyed her would have been the lazy ignorance of most of her critics (and quite a few of her admirers too). They have not done their homework, as she always did.

They loathe her because of her voice, her old-fashioned manners and style of dress, her hair. They loathe her because she looked as if she lived in a neat, well-tended suburb. They feared her as bad, idle schoolchildren fear a strict teacher.

Many of them, half-educated Marxoid doctrinaires, scorn her out of a pseudo-intellectual snobbery that is the curse of our school system. They think they are cleverer than they are. Few of them know anything about her or her government.

Alas, if they did, the spittle-flecked Left would probably dislike her a good deal less than they do. For her 11 years in office were a tragic failure, if you are a patriotic conservative. She was an active liberal in economic policy, refusing to protect jobs and industries that held communities together.

Was privatisation so wonderful? Personally, I think British Telecom is just as bad – in a different way – as the old Post Office Telephones. The privatisation of electricity, and the resulting dissipation of our nuclear skills, is one of the reasons we will soon be having power cuts. The hurried and mistaken closure of the coal mines is another. Lady Thatcher’s early embrace of Green dogma (repudiated too late) is another.

And this country still has the biggest nationalised industry in the world, the great, over-rated NHS. It also has huge armies of public-sector workers in quangos and town halls – only these days they are condom outreach workers or climate change awareness officers.

At least the old nationalised industries actually dug coal, forged steel and built ships. And at least the old industries provided proper jobs for men, and allowed them to support their families. Young mothers didn’t need to go out to work.

Income tax has certainly fallen. But indirect tax is a cruel burden, and energy costs are oppressive. The ‘Loony Left’ ideas she tried clumsily to fight in local government have now become the enthusiastically held policies of the Tory Party.

As for council house sales, that policy was in the end a huge tax-funded subsidy to the private housing industry, a vast release of money into the housing market that pushed prices up permanently and – once again – broke up settled communities. What’s conservative about that? And why, come to that, didn’t she reward the brave Nottingham and Derby miners, who defied Arthur Scargill, by saving their pits?

She was a passive, defeatist liberal when it came to education, morality and the family. In 11 years she – who owed everything to a grammar education – didn’t reopen a single one of the grammar schools she had allowed to be closed as Ted Heath’s Education Secretary.

She did nothing significant to reverse or slow the advance of the permissive society – especially the State attack on marriage through absurdly easy divorce, and the deliberate subsidies to fatherless households.

She loaded paperwork on to the police, and brought the curse of ambulance-chasing lawyers (and so ‘health and safety’) to this country. She introduced the catastrophic GCSE exam into schools.

In foreign policy, she made a lot of noise, but did little good. It was her diplomacy, and her determination to slash the Royal Navy, that made the Argentinians think they could grab the Falklands. True, she won them back, or rather the fighting services did. But they should never have been lost in the first place

Brave as she was at Brighton, she still began the surrender to the IRA that was completed by Anthony Blair. It was all very well standing firm against the Soviet menace, safely contained behind the Iron Curtain by American tanks and nuclear missiles. It was another thing fighting off the incessant threats to our liberty and independence coming from the EU.

She realised, a few months before she was deposed, how great the European danger was. That, I think, was why she was overthrown by the ‘Conservative’ Party. But for most of her time in office she allowed the EU to seize more and more power over this country and its laws. Had she been as great as she is held to be, we would not be in the terrible mess we are now in, deindustrialised, drugged en masse by dope and antidepressants, demoralised, de-Christianised, bankrupted by deregulated spivs, our criminal justice system an even bigger joke than our State schools and 80 per cent of our laws made abroad.

I will always like her for her deep, proud Englishness, her fighting spirit and her refusal to follow the bleating flock. I despise the snobs and woman-haters who sneered at her and sometimes made me ashamed of my class and my sex. I am proud to be able to say that I actually met her and spoke to her.

But I advise both her enemies and her worshippers to remember that she was human – deserving in the hour of her death to be decently respected, but to be neither despised nor idolised. May she rest in peace.

Putin: The Naked Truth

Alas I can understand what is written on the back of the young woman, fashionably protesting against Vladimir Putin.

It is very rude. Apparently the inscription on her front was even ruder.

I have no doubt Mr Putin deserves this sort of thing (though, to his credit, he doesn’t seem to mind all that much).But why, of all the many equally shady despots and tyrants of the world, is he singled out for it? It is simple. Mr Putin, for all his many faults, is the only major political leader who still holds out for his own nation’s sovereignty and independence.

Left-wingers the world over hate this, as they aim to force us all into a global utopia. If you don’t want that, then Putin is your only hope.

Is the NHS our servant or our master? When Mary Kerswell found that her medical records were full of untruths about her, she asked for a copy (as is her right, and yours) and paid a fee.

When she went to collect her documents, officious receptionists refused to give them to her.

When she in turn refused to leave, the police were called, and of course handcuffed her (they love doing this to 67-year-old women, though they are often hesitant about doing it to 17-year-old louts). They have ‘apologised’. Who cares? We know where we stand.

The BBC is making much of a measles outbreak in Swansea. The implication of much of its reporting is that those media who highlighted concerns about the MMR vaccine in the late Nineties are to blame. Not guilty.

Many parents were genuinely worried, and did not find official reassurances convincing. Why should they, given the track record of Government?

If the authorities had really wanted to avoid this, they should have authorised single measles jabs on the NHS.

Two 15-year-old youths have admitted to manslaughter after robbing an 85-year-old grandmother, Paula Castle, who fell to the ground, hit her head and died the next day.

While she was dying, the pair were busy robbing another woman, aged 75. The prosecutor said the pair ‘simply did not care what happened’ to Mrs Castle.

In fashionable circles, you will be accused of ‘moral panic’ if you think this is worrying or significant, and also told that crime figures are falling. So they are. But crime itself is rising.

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06 December 2012 1:50 PM

Forcing myself to pay attention to George Osborne’s latest budget (‘the economy is heeling over’) I was then shocked into open-mouthed silence by the appearance on Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme of Godfrey Bloom MEP, speaking out on the economy for Dad’s Army, otherwise known as UKIP. Alas for Mr Bloom, all most people hear when his name is mentioned is the phrase ‘behind the fridge’, the place where, in his view, women don’t clean enough.

This illustrates one of the problems of Dad’s Army, that it really lacks any polished and persuasive performers who can put forward a conservative case without tumbling straight into the enemy’s mantraps, where they lie howling that it’s all very unfair.

Perhaps this is because Mr Bloom is a mighty intellect, poor at communication but great at thinking. Or perhaps not.

He used his brief slot on the nation’s premier radio current affairs show to call repeatedly for cuts in public spending, as if he had been wound up and programmed by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and had only just been allowed out and set in motion.

As somebody (Who was it? Not Immanuel Kant or Blaise Pascal, anyway) recently said, UKIP is really just the Thatcherite Tory Party in exile. It is very light on social , moral and cultural conservatism, and seems to me to be neo-liberal in foreign and economic policy. Continued membership of NATO, for instance, is endorsement of neo-liberalism abroad. Various ideas borrowed from newspaper columnists have then been stuck on to the manifesto, in no particular order. If you mix together the concepts ‘Jeremy Clarkson’ and ‘Think Tank’ (themselves mutually hostile) you will get the picture.

Also I really cannot see how spending cuts by themselves are a coherent policy in modern Britain. You have to reduce the demand for spending first, and that is a social and cultural matter, which may cost quiet a lot of money. The entire economy (as economists such as David Blanchflower seem to me to imply) is now so dependent on public spending for survival that large spending cuts, though undoubtedly desirable in principle, will simply kill the patient. He is too ill for any such treatment. You might as well bleed someone who’s suffering from blood loss.

The levels of spending in this country are the consequence of 50 years of leftist social policy. The family, the church, independent charity and self-reliance have been undermined to the point that they barely exist as forces, while the state, and its quasi-independent agencies, have grown enormously. Manufacturing industry as an employer has shrivelled. The unproductive public sector wobbles on top of the productive economy. Our ability to export has likewise atrophied.

How on earth an immediate radical spending cut will do good under such circumstances, I honestly don’t know. The government’s tax receipts would plunge, as large numbers of public employees stopped paying income tax because they were unemployed. And its liabilities would increase, as they had to be paid various doles and allowances instead. Result: More borrowing, plus less economic activity, as you would have taken so much purchasing power out of the economy. Aldi and Lidl might benefit. I don’t think anyone else would. We did, sort of, go through this before in the Thatcher-Howe era. But the enormous receipts from North Sea Oil (now over) served as great national cushion.

If this is wrong, I’d be interested to know why. Serious conservatives, with a practical intent, must recognise that the country can only be weaned slowly off the disastrous welfare dependency it now faces, and cannot instantly recover from the deindustrialisation inflicted on it by market liberals who wrongly insisted that manufacturing didn’t matter. The reconstruction of the family, of proper education able to produce employable people, plus a long campaign to persuade people that debt is bad for them, might take 20 or 30 years to have much of an effect.

A large cultural and moral revolution, in short, is called for. And that won’t happen until there are what Tony Benn calls teachers, and signposts in national politics (he always says that there are two kinds of politicians, signposts and weathervanes, and I agree with him). Such people need to confront, honestly, the huge size of the problems we face, and recognise our permanently diminished status as a country. They need to be bolstered by serious journalism, which is likewise prepared to kook our crisis in the face, admit that we have been mistaken, and by an academy which is equally thoughtful.

Such conditions seem to me to be very unlikely, and absolutely impossible while British political discourse is still dominated by two mobs, one of which says ‘thatcher was wrong!’;, and the other of which shouts back ‘Maggie was right!’.

Hence the need for a political and cultural counter-revolution, for which the undoubted collapse of the Tory Party is an essential precondition. The idea that we can, in the course of a single election, restore Britain to its former state is laughable. It will be a long, long march.

And during that Long, Long March, we will have to recognise that the current economic crisis is not really a temporary period through which we can pass before the tills start ringing again. It is a process by which we get used to our reduced status, itself largely the result of our long period of unrealistic, utopian folly.

Much more likely, we will carry on as we are, and be overtaken, in the end, by a great wave of inflation and devaluation which will sweep away almost all we have come to rely on, and leave us savagely reduced, but at least in touch with reality.

As to the Irish Question, it’s that old issue of how title to territory is established, again (see my recent article on Gaza and Israel). There’s no absolute objective standard (for otherwise any Irish nationalist would have to call for the restoration of the USA to the Native Americans, for example). Thus, though any patriotic person must recognise the force, justice and power of Irish patriotism, sensible and humane compromise seems wise to me. It’s certainly better that , where two ethnic or cultural groups strive for supremacy on a piece of territory, neither one rules over the other. It’s also always better if violence is not rewarded, as it very much has been since 1998.

Irish friends of mine will privately confess that Eamon de Valera’s Free State and Republic was not generous to its Protestant minority, and that the 1937 Irish Constitution, in particular, was a sectarian document.

IN my turn, I certainly accept that the six-county state of Northern Ireland treated its Roman Catholic minority very unfairly. But then, as I have many times said (though nobody among my Irish nationalist critics ever remembers it ) , I think the Stormont Parliament and government were a mistake from the start. After 1922, Northern Ireland should have been fully integrated into Great Britain. The ‘Irish Dimension’ so dangerously revived by John Hume should have been closed for good. The Northern Irish Protestants should have been given the following bargain – that they should indeed remain British, but that being British would mean that they accepted the rules of the mainland.

With the possibility of Dublin rule reliably excluded, they should have joined British national politics, forgetting the divisions of religion, and accepting the equality between Protestant and Roman Catholic subjects of the Crown. It is one of the striking things about Northern Ireland that the British political parties have never seriously recruited or operated there. I know there has been a cosmetic introduction of the Tory party in recent years, but it is a half-hearted and belated thing. In the Blair years it was easier to join the Labour Party in Manhattan than it was to do so in Belfast.

And all the petty and stupid discriminations, in employment, housing and voting, should have been got rid of. I would except the school system, as I think people are entitled to hand on their religion and culture all the more when these things are no longer keys to dominance, or badges of oppression and rebellion. And I’m a great admirer of Northern Ireland’s selective secondary schools.

As it happened, the period of direct rule achieved many of those things, and certainly made great progress towards them. But it was intended, by the British government, as a preliminary status to the current slow-motion handover to Dublin, not as an end in itself. So nobody will speak for it now, or draw lessons from it.

It is interesting that a country which was prepared to send a Task Force thousands of miles to keep 1,800 Falklanders British (because they desired to be), abandoned efforts to keep hold of part of its own immediate national territory (despite the strong desire of many of its inhabitants to remain British), and abandoned any serious effort to integrate and befriend the dissenting minority. There was never any reason why Crown and Shamrock, or Crown and Harp, should not be part of the same cap badge, and the same coat of arms. There are plenty of loyal British Roman Catholics. Such a missed opportunity to create what might have been an example to the world of what British tolerance could achieve.

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18 August 2012 11:05 PM

Those who thought Margaret Thatcher was a conservative should have realised she wasn’t when she wrecked the British Sunday.

Is there anyone who really needs supermarkets and other big stores to be open on Sunday? I don’t remember starving back in the old days when such shops were closed.

As for it being vital to our economy, Germany – whose economy is vastly healthier than ours – has the strictest Sunday closing laws in the world.Doesn’t every home need a still, untroubled day of rest, when everyone can relax at the same time?

Even Joseph Stalin, at the height of his Marxist rage against private life, failed to abolish the Sabbath. It took Britain’s Tories to succeed where he failed.

And now, after an ‘experiment’ in longer Sunday hours during the Olympics (and what have the Olympics to do with Sunday shopping in the first place?), Downing Street is talking about extending it.

This will mean more pressure on shop workers to work on Sunday, and more small shops put out of business by the incessant greed and ruthlessness of the supermarkets.

The Tory Party rightly points out that Labour is in the pocket of the unions. But both major parties are the puppets of the hypermarket giants.

And here I must put in a good word for Vince Cable, who is (as so often) being smeared and blackguarded by the whispers of Westminster’s professional backstairs-crawlers and their media receptacles.

Mr Cable is standing out against making longer opening hours permanent.

In doing so, he is quite properly being consistent with what he said to Parliament on April 30: ‘There is the suspicion, which we have already had aired, that the Bill is a Trojan horse preparing the way for a permanent relaxation of the rules. It is not.’

But what about his Tory colleague Mark Prisk, who told the Commons with equal clarity: ‘We have no intention of making the measure permanent’?

There’s a lot of tripe talked about how ripping up the rules that make life bearable in this country – from Sunday trading to the green belt – will save our failing economy.

It won’t. It will just turn a once pleasant landscape into a hooting, yelling version of Istanbul, a paradise for greed, and nothing to see for miles and miles but traffic jams, concrete and plastic.

Happiness is The Dandy and Fry's chocolate

The world would be poorer without comic strips. I learned to read with an ancient Tiger Tim annual, found in an attic.

I hungered each week for the Beano and the Dandy and can remember Desperate Dan when he was in black and white – though my favourite strip, for some reason, was one called Jonah, about a sailor whose ships invariably sank with a loud ‘Bloop!’

One of my chief pleasures is re-reading volumes of Calvin And Hobbes, the funniest and cleverest strip cartoon ever drawn.

So to hear that Desperate Dan is doomed is to be tormented with the half-remembered tastes, smells and sounds of the day before yesterday, like George Orwell’s lyrical description of Edwardian boyhood in Coming Up For Air.

I am once again digging (unsuccessfully) for gold on Dartmoor, eating Fry’s Five Boys chocolate, waving at steam trains, or riding my bike helmetless down car-free country roads.

If it were now, I’d be hunched in front of a screen slurping at a bucket of sugared water. I’m often falsely accused of nostalgia, but this time I plead guilty.

Team GB just reveals how far we've declined

Puzzled by hearing about ‘Team GB’ during the Olympics, I sought to find out exactly why the entire United Kingdom wasn’t represented at the Games.

It turns out to be a very complex subject. ‘Team GB’ as a name dates back to 1999, though the problem is much older.

The International Olympic Committee, that politically correct body, doesn’t seem to recognise the border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. Could that be why the Olympic Torch veered down to Dublin at one point? I’m not sure.

It’s quite well-known that athletes from Northern Ireland can compete in the Irish or British teams, as they wish. The rule was made in 1952 after two Northern-born swimmers were barred from the Irish team in 1948 amid some bitterness.

The gradual departure of Northern Irish athletes from the British team is a sensitive measure of Britain’s diminishing power. The process is not over.

I wonder how long it will be before Belfast athletes get into trouble for joining Team GB?

Why did the BBC choose Russell Brand, the alleged comedian (and tormentor of Andrew Sachs), to make a documentary about drugs?

Apparently, admitting to having used a lot of illegal drugs makes you an expert.

When I challenged Mr Brand’s qualifications on live TV, he screeched at me a bit, then offered to kiss me. I declined.

A viewer complained about the way I was treated on this programme, and was told ‘… as impartiality is the cornerstone of our entire programme-making process there is certainly no bias against Peter Hitchens’.

I am going to have this sentence stuffed and mounted, so I can keep it in a glass case.

Bring back BR, not Worst Late Western

I never thought I would feel sorry for Richard Branson. But it is obviously wrong and stupid to deprive him of the West Coast rail franchise, and give it to Worst Late Western.

Mr Branson may be pretty awful, but I wouldn’t let Worst Late Western operate a supermarket trolley.

They are experts in greedy fare increases and padded timetables that allow them to run trains slower than they were 20 years ago, yet claim to be punctual. They inflict endless futile announcements on passengers who want peace, but resort to total silence when their elderly trains are mysteriously becalmed in the dark.

But that’s railway privatisation for you, which vies with Gordon Brown’s sale of our gold reserves as the stupidest government policy of modern times.

Some people claim British Rail was worse. But BR didn’t have anything like the money that was given to the private train operators (who siphoned it all out into their own pockets) and also to Failcrack, the people who shamefully neglected what had until then been some of the best maintained lines in the world.

Now the subsidies are being squeezed, and so it is the passengers who suffer.

The Transport Department hates railways and loves roads and airlines, which is why roads are still nationalised (who did you think owned them?), and air travel is still hugely subsidised, thanks to the exemption of aviation fuel from duty and VAT.

I love trains and think they are a great British invention and vital to civilisation. But even if you don’t agree with me, you’d miss them if they weren’t there because of all the goods and cars that would end up on the roads instead.

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27 June 2012 1:57 PM

At the back end of the 1960s, student Marxists (and I was then one of them) were trying to make friends with what they (or we) called ‘The Workers’. This mythical social force was, to us, an undifferentiated mass of muscular proletarians who could be persuaded to overthrow the capitalist state and put us in power. From time to time, actual contact would be made. When it was, we found out that ‘the workers’ were in fact individual human beings, not a faceless class, and that, while they were often touched and even impressed by our concern for their well-being, they had real lives of their own to lead, and real concerns not to be solved by our stupid revolution. They often disappointed us, too by turning out to have patriotic and religious opinions that, if our theories were right, they should not have had.

Even so, there was something tremendously moving and romantic about the great heroic industries that still existed then, especially coal-mining with the act of going to work a daily exercise of courage. The mighty bond of shared adversity held pitmen and their families together, and left outsiders feeling not merely excluded, but cheated of an emotional richness and a solidarity they could never hope to feel in their blander, safer lives. It’s a little like the shared adversity, and the shared warmth, of wartime. One of my most treasured memories is of the day I went down a pit for the first and only time, crawling on hands and knees through an 18-inch seam a mile underground, and relying utterly on the competence and support of the men I was with. Thanks to them, and not to me, I never felt a moment’s real fear.

But that would come some time after I had seen Alan Plater’s play ‘Close the Coalhouse Door’, which I think must have been in my last term at York University in the summer of 1973. I travelled up to Newcastle to see it (John Woodvine, one of the stars of the big TV police drama of the day, Z-cars, headed the cast). It must have been a revival even then, as the play was first staged in 1968. It was a summer evening after final exams were over, and I was with some equally revolutionary companions. I remember that, after the train fare and the theatre tickets, we had enough cash left for just one half-pint of beer each in the interval. Students were wonderfully well-off in those days, but we didn’t have credit or debit cards, or loans of any kind, and you could only spend what you had, which I’m inclined to think is a good system.

Anyway, I enjoyed Plater’s dialogue and Alex Glasgow’s memorable agitprop songs (Glasgow was a genius at pithy revolutionary rhymes – I still remember one of them called ‘We want more pay’ about the 1972 miners’ claim, almost word for word) and we came back on the train in a kind of euphoria. Perhaps the workers really were on our side.

Piffle, as it turned out, but the thing lingered in my memory as part of a mis-spent but instructive youth So when it was revived this summer in my local theatre. I went back to see it again. And I found that it is not I, but the Left, who suffer from belief in a golden age.

The play has had to be pretty powerfully re-engineered in the intervening 40 years . I wish I could see a copy of the 1973 script, to check my memory. In some ways the best scene in the new version is the opening one, where the audience are cleverly taken out of the post-Thatcher present day into a pre-Maggie Garden of Eden in which there are actual miners, living in terraced houses in pit villages, under the shadow of the winding gear.

Some of the rest of it I recalled as if it were yesterday. But was there so much football in the original? And were there any f-words, or a fight? Maybe the fight, but I very much doubt the f-words. The inclusion of the phrase ‘all fur coats and no knickers’ was pretty shocking in provincial Tyneside, less than ten years after the abolition of stage censorship. And the proto-feminism? Was that in there 40 years ago? Left-wing revolutionaries in the early 70s weren’t, as I recall, very interested in the women’s movement. Rather the contrary, quite often.

But at the end of it there’s a curious moment where the actors speak at some length of an alternative history of the past four decades, in which there was no Thatcher, no collapse of manufacturing industry, no privatisation, and the cottage cosiness of the pre-1979 world somehow survives, along with plenty of socialist nobility.

Alas, I do not think this was the alternative. The gentler, poorer but kinder Britain that seemed so inviolable and settled in 1973 was already finished by then. The giant social changes of the 1960s were working through the system – comprehensive education, the huge expansion of the teaching profession, the growth of social work as a profession, the liberalisation of divorce, the revolutionising of the benefits system, the breakdown of taboos on sex, bad language and pornography, the abandonment of the principle of punishment in the justice system had already come about in the Wilson years . These changes mattered, and the altered the way people lived, though it wouldn’t become clear till the early 1980s just how much this was so.

The introduction of colour TV made that medium a hundred times more powerful (and conformist) than it had been before, thanks to the ‘ETBPLG’ effect (‘Even the Bad Programmes Look Good’).

And beneath all, that slow-motion earthquake, British membership of the European Community (as it then was) was compelling changes that nobody wanted or expected, and exposing our economy to forces from which it had until then been shielded. I remember, round about 1972, hearing a conversation between two in-the-know journalists on the fringe of the revolutionary movement in which one was saying to the other that the political classes knew that membership of the ‘Common Market’ would have a devastating effect on our way of life, but that they had thought it better to keep quiet about it, as the alternative was far worse. And then there was the 1973 Arab-Israel war, and the colossal oil shock which followed, the moment, which, for me, ended the sunny carefree atmosphere which had somehow persisted in this country since the mid-1960s.

Much of what happened under Maggie (over-rated by her admirers and her detractors in almost equal measure) would have happened anyway, by my guess.

It is all very well blaming Ted Heath or Margaret Thatcher , or Rupert Murdoch (or Arthur Scargill, for that matter). Each played their individual parts in the transformation. But far more influential than any of them was old Roy Jenkins, who remains the most influential British politician of the age, despite never having held the supreme office ( and he, as you’d never have guessed from meeting or hearing him, was the son of a miner, a strike leader imprisoned during the general Strike of 1926. Close the Coalhouse Door, indeed).

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14 January 2012 10:21 PM

If David Cameron wants to hurry Scotland out of the United Kingdom, he is going the right way about it. The more he says he loves the Union, the more I fear for it. For all his bluster, he must know that the SNP has a moral mandate to hold a referendum on independence when it wants to do so. Placing legal obstacles in its way will rightly anger reasonable Scots.

I have seldom seen a clearer example of someone setting out to achieve the opposite of what he claims to want. Mr Cameron would guillotine the Queen in Trafalgar Square if he thought it would keep him in office. So breaking up the country for the sake of a parliamentary majority would not be much of a strain for him. And getting the Scots out of Westminster is his best hope of such a majority.

How on earth do we find ourselves in this mess? Only 40 years ago, Scottish Nationalism was a weird fad, preached in garbled tones by hairy communist poets and funny old ladies. Tory Unionists held dozens of Westminster seats. Now Nationalism is a mighty force, led by an astute man, close to attaining its goal. Unionism is dead and the Scottish Tories are a laughable remnant of eccentric bystanders led by a lesbian kickboxer.

But it is not Alex Salmond’s cunning that has brought this about. It is the European Union, which needs to turn this country into manageable chunks before it can feed it into the Euro-blender and destroy it for ever.

Notice how any part of the UK can have a referendum on reducing the powers of London (and Northern Ireland can vote to leave the Union altogether, any time it wants to). But nobody can have a vote of any kind on reducing the powers of Brussels, let alone on leaving the EU. The truth is obvious, but nobody observes it.

Brussels rejoices to see Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland becoming ever more separate from England. It would like to see England itself Balkanised into ‘regions’ – and the new multicultural republic of London under President Boris is a major step towards that.

As it happens, I love Scotland. I value its huge contributions to our joint history in thought, war, invention, industry and literature. I think it should make its own laws. I think it is quite right that England, far bigger and richer, should subsidise it. But I do not think it can be truly independent. It is too small, and not rich enough.

And before anyone mentions Scandinavia, they should look at the troubled history of that region, its tiny nations repeatedly occupied or menaced into subjection by more powerful neighbours. All an independent Scotland could hope for, until the EU came along, was a grim, pinched future on the fringe of Europe.

Now, it can either be a part of a United Kingdom, sharing a long and mostly happy history, a love of liberty, an astonishing inventiveness and industry and remarkable valour in war; or it can be a province of the Brussels empire, granted all the toys and trappings of nationhood but actually far less free and autonomous than it is now.

Brussels would be happy to let Scotland (like Ireland) have a flag and an anthem. There would be Scottish EU passports, token Scottish armed forces, a Scottish international dialling code and internet code, Scottish postage stamps and a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation.

The political classes of Edinburgh and Glasgow would be able to feast on Brussels money. But every important decision would be taken by the EU. You can see why this appeals to professional politicians. But it is hard to see how it would help normal men and women. Yet, unless we all fight our way out of the EU, our country will be broken up and our flag made meaningless.

Old age shows no mercy to women. Nor does this film

The makers of the incredibly nasty new film about Lady Thatcher seem to have been mainly worried that the feminist sisterhood might attack it. I expect that is why they invited my anti-sexist, right-on opposite number, Suzanne Moore, to a private dinner with the film’s star, Meryl Streep.

Ms Streep cooked her own-recipe apple pie for Suzanne and several other notable media women. By contrast, they didn’t even ask sexist, reactionary little me to a preview, though their PR firm ceaselessly invites me to free advance showings of other, less interesting films. Well, never mind. I can afford my own ticket and saw it on the night it was released, so you don’t have to.

After much thought, I have decided that it is one of the most cynical, unpleasant and cruel films I have ever seen. It will be a pity if it makes anyone rich. I am certainly not a Thatcher-worshipper. But nor am I a Thatcher-hater. And I think you would have to hate her quite a lot to approve of this film.

Many of us – even if we do not now know it – will sink into the dementia which she has suffered. Why, the people responsible for this film may themselves end their days as tragic husks of what they are now.

Will they, their friends or their families think it proper to make a public spectacle of this decline while they are still alive? It wasn’t necessary. It was wrong. And because old age is so much more merciless to women than it is to men, I think the right-on feminists should join me in protesting.

We need low-speed rail... and lots of it

The campaign against the new high-speed rail line through the Chilterns is overdone. Railways don’t do nearly as much damage as motorways, and I can’t remember anyone fussing much about the hideous, irreparable scar made in the Chilterns by the M40, visible 20 miles away.

But if there’s money to spare for building railways, what we need is low and medium-speed lines that go where we want to go, not bullet trains between big cities. Our island is so small that a 125mph maximum is quite high enough.

The lunatic mistake of the Beeching cuts, which left dozens of medium-size towns without a station, needs to be reversed. And perhaps above all, England needs a decent East-West link for both passengers and goods.

Here we Gove again...

I wondered how long it would be before Michael Gove said he would make it easier to ‘sack bad teachers’. Every Education Secretary in living memory is eventually reduced to saying this. Nothing changes, and it won’t until they bring back grammar schools.

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09 January 2012 3:04 PM

I am grateful to the many readers who wrote to endorse my plea for the rule of law, following the Lawrence murder trial. I am also grateful to those who disagreed, for taking the trouble to recognise that this is an important issue that civilised states must discuss and decide.

The principle that law triumphs over power has always seemed to me to be one of the most important results of the Christian foundation of our civilisation.

Behind it lies the belief that the law itself stems from an idea of ultimate good and justice, which is beyond our power to alter and which exists for all time and which overrides our emotions and desires, as well as trumping mere temporal power. It is the existence of such a rule of law, not the largely phoney trumpery of universal suffrage ‘democracy’, which distinguishes free and civilised nations from despotic slums. If those who sought to reform Russia after the collapse of the Soviet regime had concentrated on the rule of law, rather than on the forms of democracy, they might have achieved something important. As it is, they have what they have.

Of course, this is a choice. It is often tempting to override the rule of law. Everyone must feel this temptation from time to time. I certainly have. But it is precisely when it seems most attractive to ignore it or push it aside, that it is most important to defend it. I’ve been a little shocked that so few voices have been raised in its defence this past week.

Bannockburn Refought

After meeting him one evening long ago, in a rather agreeable castle, for a TV discussion programme, I formed the idea that Alex Salmond was a very clever man indeed. If he went into a revolving door behind you, he would probably come out in front. (Though I could have done without him correcting my frenchified pronunciation of ‘Mary of Guise’ . I’m English. We don’t talk about her as much as the Scots do. ) He’s a loss to Britain as a whole. If only he regarded himself as British, I have a feeling he would be keen on regaining our independence from the EU, and be very smart at achieving that objective.

But sadly for us all, he was born in these dismal times. Let me say here first of all that I don’t do silly anti-Scottish jeering. My earliest memories are of Scotland, of Scottish landscapes and Scottish voices, so I continue to love the place. In general, I have a high opinion of that small country, which has produced many great men and much important thought. Its contribution to our joint history has been huge and mainly beneficial. We’re lucky to be neighbours (that goes both ways).

I also see that there is a problem with the way Scotland is governed. From the 1707 Act of Union until devolution, Scotland had a legal system without a parliament. What is more it had for centuries had a parliament of its own. Some sort of fairly powerful legislative body had to be created, and the United Kingdom ought to have been strong enough to survive the arrangement I wouldn’t have said this ten years ago, but I have since changed my mind. I am much less sure that Wales either wants or needs its own assembly, and I am completely against any sort of parliament for Northern Ireland which – if it is to have justice and law – would be much better off ruled directly from London. I think such a solution would also have been better by far for the Irish Republic, which is going to face many difficulties when it eventually absorbs Northern Ireland as a very anomalous and troublesome special autonomous zone.

I am also against the recent creation of a fifth province of the United Kingdom, Livingstonia, or ‘Greater London’. This sizeable Republic (for its elected head of state is really a mini-President, though he is called a mayor) subverts the whole shape of the British constitution, and creates a needless new power in the country. What London needs is small, efficient, truly local borough councils, not some grandiose and gargantuan Thing.

But all of these would be minor troubles if it were not for the real reason behind the break-up of what was until very recently a genuinely United Kingdom.

This is the growth in the power and wealth of the European Union. The EU is deeply prejudiced against nation states, and exerts itself to break them up. It has a particular dislike of Federal multi-ethnic states such as Yugoslavia (which the EU has helped break up by aggressive diplomacy and force) or the United Kingdom (which the EU seeks to break up by subtlety). It wants allegiance, and subsidy, to flow as directly as possible from Brussels to the provinces or ‘regions’. Indeed, it cannot really ever be complete until this is the arrangement, with the life sucked out of the official capitals as far as possible.

Countries without regions (such as Portugal) are more or less compelled to have them. Even federal mono-ethnic states are under pressure to regionalise, not that Germany needs much encouragement to do so, as it was before 1870 made up of many small states, and still has fierce and genuine regional loyalties and differences.

I have always remembered entering the EU from the east, before Poland joined. When you reached the Polish-German border, there was a huge sign, bearing the yellow stars of Brussels, saying (in German) ‘Welcome to the European Union’. A short way after that was a prominent sign saying ‘Welcome to Brandenburg’ (the German state which borders Poland at that point). Some distance after that, almost hidden in the snowy grass, was a small and rather diffident sign saying ‘Welcome to Germany’.

A this time I still possessed an official map of Europe published by the European Parliament (this has since been revised, after being much criticised in the British media). It showed the British Isles divided into Euro-regions (an idea that is not dead, but sleepeth). There were two very interesting aspects of this. One was that while Scotland and Wales were each regions in their own right, and were named on the map, England was broken up into such exciting areas as ‘South East’ . And the word ‘England’ was absent from the map.

The other was that Ireland had two competing sets of frontiers – one the international border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the other the regional borders of Leinster, Ulster, Munster and Connacht. It looked – and I think was designed to look –temporary.

It’s my view that Scotland, for all its energy and history, simply isn’t big enough to function as a fully independent country comparable to Britain. I doubt it has enough oil and gas left to be as independent as Norway. I certainly doubt that it could sustain its own currency, or any armed forces beyond a coastguard and a small army with no possibility of power projection. Nor do I think it could afford a full-scale diplomatic service.

But it could certainly take on many of the superficial characteristics of a nation, within the EU but separate from England, with the lines of power and money running between Edinburgh and Brussels/Frankfurt. There could be a Scottish EU passport, a Scottish flag flying alongside the others in Brussels, a Scottish anthem, a Scottish broadcasting corporation, a Scottish version of the EU border, Scottish postage stamps. Scottish law and policing would quite possibly be brought more into line with continental practice. If the single currency weren’t in such a mess, then Scotland might also consider joining the Euro – it was, after all, Ireland’s decision to abolish its Punt that finally made the division real and hard. Then there’s Schengen. Like Ireland, I would guess that a Scottish government would like to implement the EU’s open borders scheme – but couldn’t do so while the rest of the UK stayed outside. A Scottish departure from the UK could make it harder for England and Wales alone to keep up our resistance against the opening of our borders to passport-free travel from the rest of the EU. Paradoxically, Scotland might bring Berlin time to England – by negotiating its own Scottish time zone north of the border.

This is all speculation, but well within the bounds of possibility if the EU continues in being. Without the EU, in my view, it would be fanciful.

As to what David Cameron is playing at, I know that if I were him ( i.e. a cynical office–seeker who doesn’t know what a principle is), I would pretend noisily to be in favour of the Union, while quietly doing all I could to help break it up. (Why? Because removing the Scottish MPs provides the only chance of the Tory party ever again winning a majority at Westminster.) The current attempts to boss Scotland around, and tell it what sort of referendum it can hold, seem likely to me to achieve this perfectly. No red-blooded Scot will be pleased to be told that he can’t decide his own future, and so support for Mr Salmond will increase. But in England, Mr Cameron’s Olympically dim hero-worshippers will praise him for his toughness. I am told that the UK civil service increasingly behaves as if Scotland is en route to independence. Why and how is that happening?

Harsh and Cruel

I aim to say more about this soon, but I was amazed at how personally harsh and cruel the new film about Lady Thatcher is. It is just possible that the opening device of an old and bemused woman wandering into a corner shop is justified dramatically as the starting point for a review of her life, just as George Bailey’s attempted suicide is justified in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’.

But the film is not content with that. The actress Meryl Streep spends a huge part of the film in heavy ageing make-up, stooped and mumbling, hallucinating and in conversation with a (very badly caricatured) phantasm of her late husband Denis. This fancy, which I think is based on some (perhaps unwise) revelations by her daughter Carol, is ceaselessly employed to link up the otherwise disjointed scenes and more or-less politically illiterate account of Margaret Thatcher’s rise to office and her period in power.

I confess to having enjoyed quite a lot of it. I didn’t see it at a preview but in a normal cinema in my left-wing home town, where the theatre was packed but where audience reaction was quite muted. I think I enjoyed it because it awoke (even if by its inaccuracy) quite a lot of memories of an interesting part of my life. Also, I am not and never have been a Thatcher partisan, let alone one of her friends or intimates. But I would think anyone who has suffered the awful experience of a parent or grandparent with dementia will find the film distressing and cruel. And in any case, I had to wonder, what was the aim of the makers? No doubt they are hoping for big audiences in the USA ( where Lady Thatcher is still much admired) as well as here ( where feelings are rather more mixed). I’m not quite sure why, in that case, they should dwell so much on the distressing mental decline of an elderly woman, a terrible affliction all too common in modern Britain and America, and by no means confined to controversial ex-premiers. I could hazard a few guesses, though.